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Break out the glitter body-paint, because The Apple is the Greatest Movie EVER?

Click on the movie title or the picture above to download our review of the film, featuring special guest host, Celebrity Translator Neil Nadelman.

Review in a Nutshell: Either a ham-fisted musical allegory or a piece of Illuminated propaganda, The Apple is a strange, disjointed film held together by the gooey goodness of Golan / Globus and Vladek Sheybal’s charming turn as Mr. Boogalow.

13 Responses

This has always been my favorite bad movie. Glad to see you review it. Personally, I’ve found that The Apple works best when you try not to put any deep thought into it whatsoever and simply view it as one of the craziest musicals ever written. I assume that’s all the filmmakers thought about it, after all.

Wow, a movie with Joss Ackland in it and no ones makes a “Diplomatic Immunity” joke?

I vaguely remember this movie from my childhood. I also keep confusing this movie with the Bee Gees’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

Also, Allan Love, the guy who played Dandy, became a resturanteur and was featured on the UK version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Needless to say, he didn’t fall Ramsay’s advice and the place closed about 6 months later.

As you might have guessed from the podcast, discussing The Apple is problematic. Paul pointed out that the glory of this movie is experiencing its unapologetic weirdness, because the story itself is simplistic and sounds like something a child might make up on the fly. The thing that really fascinates me about it isn’t so much that it’s bad (because it’s very, VERY bad), but that it’s obvious that Golan really thought he was making something special here. The movie’s inept, but made with a surprising amount of care. I really wonder if he thought he was making a deep statement about Man when writing this thing.

Of course, there’s also the hilarious costumes, the bizarre “futuristic” station wagons they drive, and scenes like the one where Alphie suddenly cops a feel off of his middle-aged land lady. And hell, like I said in the podcast, the scene of the national BIM hour, with prancing fascists and choreographed fire fighters letting the house burn down behind them is worth the price of admission alone.

I saw “The Apple” with a friend of mine in New York with no knowledge of what I was getting into. It was playing at the IFC Center. There were people who were such fans of The Apple they had made their own BIM marks. My friend had some mylar cut into triangles, but these people had BIM marks with the actual logo from the movie. Only in New York probably.

Before listening to this review the only lyrics I think I remembered were: “Speeeeeeeed!”, “Voodoo apple!”, and “how does it FEEEEEEEEELLLLLL…”

Bothering to add in my two cents long after the podcast was ended, I just like to say a few things about THE APPLE.

I first saw this one many, many years ago when a pal of mine sent me a tape he recorded the film off Flix or some channel. God that was a painful 90 minutes of music, dancing and allegorical prose. Not sure how I felt after witnessing Mr. Topps’s eventual appearance, though seeing Joss Ackland’s appearance as the hippie leader prompted from friend to call him “Hippie Gandalf”, and I couldn’t agree more.

Love Paul’s thoughts on what the hidden meaning to this film was that I couldn’t care less in the end, but it’s quite interesting looking back on it, but still a good, bad movie you can leave your brain at the door before entering!